Use Stanza to turn your iPhone into an ebook reader - Are you serious?

In my previous post The state of ebook technology today I claimed that any device without an e-ink display was not a serious e-reader contender. Chris Meadows from Teleread.org disagreed and alerted me to the fact that the iPhone has taken off as an e-reader due to its compact size and bright, crystal clear display. Yes, but it’s still a tiny, LCD screen. Surely it can’t be pleasant to read from such a small screen for sustained periods of time.

However over 500,0000 downloads of Stanza, the most popular iPhone e-reader would seem to indicate that maybe an iPhone or iPod touch can make a decent e-reader. The only way to know for sure was to try it myself.

I have a generation-1 iPod touch. To run Stanza or any other application from the iTunes store for that matter, requires an upgrade to version  2.0 of the OS. Apple charges $12.99 for this privilege of being able to buy more stuff from their store. Thankfully Stanza itself is free.

Stanza comes as two components - the reader application which runs on your iPhone or iPod touch and a desktop application for your Mac or Windows PC. You don’t strictly need the desktop application if you just want to read books from Stanza’s online libraries and bookstores. The desktop application also works as a reader but its main purpose is to convert reading material from a multitude of formats (e.g. PDF, Html, RTF, …) into the standard ePub format used by Stanza. Once converted you can download them to your iPhone using its wifi connection.

Stanza Desktop Application

Now before I report my findings I need to state upfront that I’m coming from a heavily biased position. I’ve been a big fan of ebooks for a while now but instead of reading from the screen, I first convert them to speech so I can listen to them on my iPod. I’m such a believer in this approach that I’ve created an application, Text2Go to do this. I much prefer listening to reading from a tiny screen.

The first thing to do was to get some reading material onto my iPod. I wanted to read up on Stanza for this post so I used the desktop application to load some of the web pages on Stanza’s site onto my iPod. That way I could read them during my 1 hour train trip to my day job. There’s an Open Location command to do just this. Simply paste in a URL and the page will be downloaded and converted.  Make sure you have  Sharing Enabled, switch to your iPod and it will appear as a shared book. Tap the Download button and you’re done.

Transferring files from your PC works much the same way, except you use Open File instead of Open URL. I transferred a couple of PDFs so I could experience reading for long periods of time from the screen.

Reading with Stanza on the iPod touch

My first impression of the display is wow - the text is crisp, clear and gorgeous. There are two companies that really know how to render fonts to the screen and Apple is one of them.

Microsoft is the other with its ClearType technology. Each company has a different philosophy on how to render fonts - Apple prefers to render fonts as faithfully as possible to the original typeface whereas Microsoft tries to optimize its fonts to fit within pixel boundaries to improve on-screen readability. You can see the differences below in text rendering employed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (left), Apple’s Safari (middle) and Firefox (right).

Text rendering differences between IE (left), Safari and Firefox

Text can be viewed in either portrait or landscape orientation. I prefer landscape as I find the longer lines make the text easier to scan. There are a number of settings that let you change the appearance of the text, such as font, size, colour, text alignment and line spacing, etc. Text alignment is set to right-justify by default. I had alway thought it was easier to read left justified text due to the fact that right justified text causes the spacing between words to vary. However useability studies have shown it’s not that simple and the optimum setting depends on line lengths and the speed of the individual reader. My personal preference is for left alignment (you can also choose right alignment or centered if you want to get whacky). I found it’s also worth turning on hyphenation, which is off by default. This works well and gives you slightly more words per page.

Left: Stanza reading controls. Right: Stanza settings page.

I’m not going to go into the Stanza UI in any great detail as they’ve done an excellent job in this area. The screen is divided into thirds, tap anywhere in the left third to go to the previous page, anywhere in the right  third to go to the next page, and tapping in the center brings up navigation and settings controls. The best feature is that while you’re reading there is no visible UI at all - the whole screen is used for reading. All in all it’s a top notch experience that works as you’d expect an iPhone app to.

Areas for improvement

When I first heard about Stanza I thought it would be great for reading books that don’t convert well to speech - books with lots of photos, graphics, charts, etc. Alas the current version of Stanza strips all graphics from a book, leaving just the text. I would really like to see support for graphics added in a future version. The graphics need not be displayed on the same page as the text. Each graphic could have its own page as long as it appears at the right point within the text. This would make it easy to zoom and pan around a graphic, which would be vital, given the small screen size.

Correction: Neelan Chokski of Lexcycle (Stanza) has just informed me that it’s only the Stanza Desktop application that doesn’t support images and strips them all out. The actual Stanza reader that runs on your iPhone can display images. He also recommended the open source library management application Calibre which will preserve images when converting books to the ePub format.

Books converted from PDF files tend to have some formatting problems. The most obvious is that headers and footers are run together with the main body text. To be fair to Stanza, this is due to fundamental limitations of the PDF file format, rather than Stanza itself.

Adobe designed PDF to ensure that a document will look exactly the same no matter what device it’s displayed on, be it a screen or printer. PDF documents are simply a collection of individual characters, each with their own coordinates on the page. This makes it hard to identify words and paragraphs, let alone headers and footers.

What this means is that when reading a PDF in Stanza you’ll find yourself having to identify and skip over the footer of each page. This is not too bad - humans are very good at scanning text and skipping over unimportant sections

As an aside, text to speech applications have the same problem. The difference is you can’t easily skip over small sections of text during speech playback. For this reason, when converting a PDF with Text2Go, the user needs to select just the text they want converted on each page. This produces great results during playback but requires a tedious conversion process. One idea I’ve had to improve this situation is to have the user mark up regions of the page (e.g. the footer) that should be ignored during conversion. As 99% of the pages in a book have the same layout, this approach could give the best of both worlds.

The important takeaway here is that PDF is a terrible choice as an ebook format. If you’re purchasing an ebook just about any other format is a better choice.

Conclusion

The iPhone and iPod touch combined with Stanza make for a great e-reading experience. I was pleasantly surprised with how easy on the eye reading from the screen was. I had no trouble reading for an hour straight on the train. If you already own an iPhone or iPod touch you really must give Stanza and ebooks a try.

(3 votes, average: 10 out of 10)

 Loading ...